Scene
Either everyone is hounding me for the things that only I can offer or everyone’s being nice because they feel sorry for me. Either I can’t find time to work on the thing I want to work on because there…
Category Essays
Blank Page
Fuck it, writing is impossible. All of the words I have are either dumb and self-indulgent or dumb and overdramatic or dumb and untruthful or some combination of those. I’m not sure what my point is, I am increasingly uncertain…
At The Gates
Games seldom allow you to experience them all at once or in any order you choose. Though open-world design has become more popular, there are usually some obstacles to exploring the world in its entirety, even if in some cases…
Technique and Aesthetic
There’s a danger in getting better at things. Well, there are probably several, but I have one in particular in mind right now. As you improve in your chosen field, art or music or writing or whatever, you gain the…
Verbosity and Concision
With game design, as with any sort of design intended for human use, simpler is, generally speaking, better. The history of game design is a history of streamlining and simplifying, merging similar ideas together and glossing over the technicalities. Firearms…
The Observed Life
Today was a strange day. Today we lost something, we lost a great talent. And yes I know that he was a stranger to me and yes I know that there are people dying everywhere, but still. Good night, Mr…
Passive
I spend a lot of my time in games. I work in games, I play in games. Sometimes I dream in games. When the energy it would require to actually play feels like too much, I’ll watch someone else play.…
Writing In Colors
It’s hard to know how much to expose. There is a skill to knowing how much to let through our filter. The truth and character of a piece of writing come from how honestly we express what’s in ourselves – the…
Play
The names we give things can be so unexpectedly revealing sometimes. I saw a play a few days ago. It was a good play, but that’s not relevant. This was the last staging of this show, though, and as someone…
Life in the Problem Machine
As I’ve been maintaining this blog, the focus of my posts seem to have shifted a bit. I’ve been drifting further and further away from the study of what games express, how they express it, and the limitations of our…